


there's a light in the bedroom

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [56]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: C-PTSD, Candlelight, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Power Outage, Triggers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-19
Updated: 2016-03-19
Packaged: 2018-05-27 14:34:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6288379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The power goes out around eleven, with no warning and no fanfare.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a light in the bedroom

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.
> 
> Working on clearing out at least some of the stuff that I've got half or quarter finished in my scrivener files. Eeesh.

The power goes out around eleven, with no warning and no fanfare. 

Steve blinks into the darkness, startled by how dark it actually is. His night-vision is good, inevitably good, and he's more than used to the way light pollution means it's never really dark, just dim, washed out, not light you'd want to read books by. (Not that Bucky doesn't do that anyway, sometimes.) Now everything's out - no street-lights, no building lights, no nothing, and it's overcast to boot, so the darkness is sudden and deep and startling. 

That's the first thing he thinks, first thing he notices. The second thing is that beside him on the couch, Bucky's gone absolutely still.

And he's gone _really_ still, still to the point of no audible breath, and it's the kind of stillness that rings alarm bells all over Steve's head. It's not what you'd call freezing, or at least not what Steve would: when he thinks of someone freezing he always ends up thinking of muscles clenched in the motion arrested, everything tight and tense. Bucky freezes when Steve first touches him if he's having a bad day, and sure it's not great, but it's also part of what's normal. It's really familiar. 

This isn't like that. It's just stillness. Like everything just _stopped_ , like someone flipped a switch when the lights went out. And that - 

Steve flicks his phone over to flashlight mode and puts it screen-down/light-up on the side table, and for now pretends he doesn't see by that light that Bucky's eyes are that little bit wider than is a good sign, either. But he does see it, and they are, and that's . . . 

It really _isn't_ a good sign. 

"I know there's candles somewhere," Steve says out loud, pushing himself up off the couch and picking up the tablet from where it's lying on the kitchen counter. 

It takes him a minute or two to hunt through settings in Tony's operating system beta-test to find the flashlight (he makes an absent mental note: once he finds it he sees why Tony put it there, but Steve's pretty sure the average user would end up hunting just like he did, and Tony did ask for feedback) and sets it to light up the screen rather than the focused beam out the camera-flash. He puts it on the table, and it's actually pretty damn bright. 

Then and only then does he feel like he can scoop up his phone and go hunting for candles without leaving Bucky in the dark. 

Bucky says absolutely nothing. He hasn't moved, either, despite Abrikoska butting her head against his wrist. 

Steve finds the candles in the hall closet. There's three flats of cheap tea-lights, 100 each, which he got for exactly this kind of situation, four smallish pillars because he'd had a vague thought they might look nice, and a few dozen cheap tapers too, because when he bought them he still couldn't wrap his head around the idea of electricity being so stable, or knowing he'd never end up without it because of a lean month. Not in the parts of his head way at the back that had him grabbing paraffin candles, anyway. He'd packed them almost by accident, coming back to New York from DC: they'd been in a deep drawer and he'd basically put everything in the drawer - mostly stuff like a few notepads and a container full of push-pins and a sewing kit, miscellaneous stuff that needed somewhere to go - in a box and shipped it here. 

Now he's glad he did. 

He spreads the tea-lights everywhere, probably more than he needs, except that right now he doesn't think there's such a thing as "more light than he needs". He's only limited by surfaces high enough the kitten can't jump up and set fire to her whiskers. He leaves an extra unlit tea-light beside all of the lit ones, in case it's needed later, and then gathers up the tapers and the simple, cheap candle-holders he got and takes them back to the kitchen. 

He improvises a couple more holders from tall glasses and rice. Bucky comes into the kitchen, too, heading for the coffee pot that's thankfully three-quarters full of a pot recent enough to still be warm. And even though he has to have seen what Steve's doing, he still startles when Steve puts one of the glasses down a bit harder than he meant to. 

Steve pauses. Tries not to frown. Skips _you okay?_ for the simple, "What?" so maybe they can skip over arguing whether or not Bucky's reacting to something. 

"Nothing," Bucky says, but that's what Bucky usually starts with, so Steve waits. _Nothing_ doesn't mean nothing. If Steve really was asking about something that wasn't there, he'd get a look that asked him what the Hell he's on about. _Nothing_ just means it bugs Bucky that something's up. It means he _wishes_ it was nothing. 

Bucky pours the coffee, reaches for the sugar. "S'just," he says. And there's a beat before he goes on, "It's quiet." 

And it is. 

Until Bucky says it, Steve hasn't been noticing, hasn't been thinking about it, but it is quiet now: the hum of the fridge is silent, and so is the apparently unavoidable faint whine of the TV and the computer screens and other electronics, the one that most people can't hear. It's miserable enough outside, with the cold, misting, that there aren't a lot of the other night sounds - but the rain isn't heavy enough to make much of its own noise, because it's just fine little slivers of water that get into every seam and chill you to the bone, not real drops you could see.

The Tower hums, it occurs to Steve, more or less the same way. And if the light pollution's less, that far up from the ground, they never close the blinds because it _is_ far enough up off the ground that nobody could see in anyway and besides, the glass is coated to reflect on the outside. 

"You want any?" Bucky asks, not waiting for Steve to respond to what he said. He's holding up a mug; Steve says something to the affirmative and Bucky puts the mug down on the counter to fill it. Steve finishes lighting the candles and putting a couple of them on the counter between kitchen and living-room, then steps past Bucky to go back to the dining-room with the rest on one of the bigger plates. He spreads them around the dining-room and the living-room and if it's not as bright as the lamps, at least it's definitely not dark. 

He turns off the tablet's light - not that the few minutes've made the slightest change in the power reservoir - and flips through to find a podcast or an audiobook and queue it up and trade the unusual silence for a soft female voice with a very faintly Southern accent. 

Bucky doesn't say anything about it, but when he comes in and hands Steve his coffee mug there's the very slight twist to his mouth he gets when he's disgusted with himself, so Steve hooks a finger through one of his belt-loops as he goes past and pulls him back around until Steve can rest his free arm around Bucky's shoulders, too, and his forehead against Bucky's temple. 

After a second, Bucky exhales just short of a sigh. It's a silent admission, and there's a lot in it, really - acknowledgement of what Steve's guessing, and even maybe acknowledgement that Bucky already knows what Steve's going to say, about not kicking his own ass for things that aren't his fault and aren't a problem. It stops short of agreeing, but that's not new.

Steve says, conversationally, "You know, more than once, I've kinda wondered if we should have moved to the middle of nowhere somewhere, just avoid the whole problem of people. So it's nice to know I guessed right every time I decided it was a bad idea." 

From the arm of the futon, the kitten makes a slightly plaintive sound, head craned upwards in their direction, clearly annoyed that they're up and walking around instead of where they should be at this hour - ie either sitting or in bed. Slowly, the tightness in Bucky's shoulders's let go a little, even if he probably still is angry with himself. 

"Yeah, well," he says, wryly. "For future reference I fucking hate the dark. Real dark. Not great with silence, either. Just . . .usually easy to avoid both. Around people."

Steve thinks of the bare room in Prague, something he hasn't for a long time. The bare room in the squat ugly building, with its concrete walls and one tiny window - the one that got paid for and then abandoned. 

"We've got candles and background noise," Steve says, and adds, "and you can let me dig at your neck for a while, since I think you just seriously messed something up." 

Bucky doesn't even argue or deflect, which kind of implies he did seriously tweak something when the silent panic hit; he just asks, "S'the book?" 

" _Wuthering Heights_ ," Steve replies, "so I can figure out if your Korean dramas really are worse."

"Hnn," Bucky says. "You're gonna be appalled by everyone's life-choices." The words are almost an ironic drawl, like maybe he's pulling sentences he's read somewhere out of his memory because his mind's a bit fried. 

"C'mere," Steve says. "Come sit." 

 

The tea-lights are all supposed to last for at least four hours, and the pillars and other candles, probably a lot longer. Steve's not worried about burning them all tonight, either, because frankly if the power's still off by the time the sun starts going down tomorrow, they're going to the Tower. Actually, if it's still off tomorrow they're probably going well before dusk even thinks of starting, because it's going to start getting cold in here by then. 

Part of him reflects, wryly, that if it were just him he'd tough it out. And despite the fact that Steve's definitely added "real darkness" to the starred list of things that just need not to happen (joining the smell of fish, and inhaling water, and electric shocks of any kind), Bucky'll probably try to talk him out of it, know it's for him and insist it's fine. And Steve knows he'd do the same, if you swapped them out. 

He thinks about Bruce saying once, _You know, there might be some virtue in enduring the hardships you have to, but I try to remember putting myself through any I_ don't _doesn't make me virtuous, it just makes me an idiot._

Then he'd paused and said, _I forget it a lot,_ probably because of the look Elizabeth was giving him in that moment. _But I try._

Steve's thought about that, off and on. There's something there, about vanity and stuff you do for your ego, like somehow life is a contest to show who's the best person by how much they can endure, and how that doesn't actually help anyone. And maybe if it were just him it wouldn't matter, but it's not, and Bucky goes through enough. But it'd still be stupid and unnecessary, even if it were just him. 

But right now it doesn't really matter, because it's tonight, not tomorrow. For now the candles are plenty of light and now the tablet's looping quiet music, volume turned down until it's just sound in the background, keeping there from being any kind of real silence even when everything goes still. The audiobook was okay for a while, but neither of them was really taking it in, so Steve switched it to music, quiet music without any words. 

They're lying on the flattened futon. Bucky hasn't said much of anything for at least an hour. Right now he's lying on his right side, head resting on Steve's upper arm. The kitten's curled up by his head, like it's habit even without a pillow. 

And Bucky's left arm had been resting against his own rib-cage-to-hip, lower arm bent to hang in front of him, until Steve slid his hand from wrist to elbow and pulled it over to rest palm against his ribs instead. And then he both watched and felt Bucky relax, a little. Now Bucky traces the little embroidered logo near Steve's shoulder. 

Steve wonders how much difference between cloth and thread Bucky actually feels, and what it feels _like_. 

He wonders that kind of thing a lot. There's no way to answer it, since it'd be like trying to describe a colour to someone who's never seen anything like it, so the wondering stays inside his head and it's just idle - but he does wonder. Bucky says there's pressure, and texture, but it's still not like the way you feel things with skin - and there's no pain or pleasure or itch or any of the weird complicated things skin can feel. Just shape, and pressure, and that kind of thing. 

It's reached the point where he doesn't have to work at all to think of Bucky's left arm as part of him, where the smooth feel of metal interrupted by grooves at regular points and its temperature always varying with context - that's as familiar as anything else. As familiar as skin that can be anything from warm to cool to the touch but still warm underneath, can be smooth or crossed with scar-tissue. It just . . . is. It's kind of a relief that it never ended up being as hard as he was afraid it would be. 

He'd realized even while he was still looking for him that it'd be much, much too easy for Bucky's left arm to end up turning into a kind of symbol in Steve's head, representing everything that'd changed or was wrong and broken, everything he didn't want or like or couldn't deal with. Like somehow it represented the damage to Bucky's mind. Steve'd realized it would be easy, and sworn, privately, that it _wouldn't_ happen.

And then not-so-privately, because Sam'd cornered him about it in a hotel in Rio and been pretty blunt. One of the few times he had been - in retrospect, Steve's got a good idea of just how carefully Sam was handling him. At the time, he hadn't noticed. 

At the time he hadn't noticed _much_ , granted. 

But Sam'd caught him on the hotel balcony and talked for a while about the kind of bad idea it would be, if Steve let himself think like that. About how messed up it can get, if you start identifying an injury or a physical change like that, as the manifestation of something it wasn't. Given all of that, Steve's surprised at how hard avoiding that . . .wasn't. Isn't. 

Out of all the ways he's had to change how he thinks about things, understands things, it's barely big enough to notice, except in that he expected it to be bigger. 

Steve lightly runs the side of one thumb along Bucky's left forearm, and Bucky shifts a little, head moving until he can look towards Steve's face instead of keeping the thousand yard stare beyond his own hand. 

In a life of candle-light mostly meaning money running out or other hardship, Steve's never thought much about the ways it's kinder than daylight or gaslight, incandescent bulbs or fluorescent tubes. The way it takes the sharpness out of edges, blurs the lines that life and stress carve into faces, makes everyone's skin warm and gold-touched. He's not fooled: it's not like he doesn't know what the light isn't bringing into relief, when Bucky pushes himself up on his right forearm and looks down at Steve for a minute. 

Maybe flickering gold light-and-shadow of burning paraffin hides the faint tells for suppressed wariness or - and - guilt, but it doesn't do anything for the way that Bucky's not talking, the way words end up being what the literature calls task-oriented, instead of a way to fill up the silence and bat comfortable presence back and forth. 

Steve pushes Bucky's hair back from shadowing his face, behind one ear, and takes it as a good sign when Bucky leans down to kiss him instead of watching any longer, or moving away.


End file.
